When music and physics collide - the CMS guitar

I have been a physicist working for CMS for about ten years now, and a guitarist for about twice as long. From time to time I have tried to somehow marry these two worlds, and when I became interested in guitar building I realised that I need to build a “CMS guitar”. A one-of-a-kind instrument that — like the CMS detector — would be a prototype of itself, and a way of showing CMS to people who otherwise might never have heard of it. To me, it would be a way of celebrating the experiment and showing how proud I am to be part of it. Also, I thought it would be really cool.

CMS has great visual appeal so I thought the head-on view would be great as the artwork for the guitar body. To make it even more unique I decided to order a jigsaw puzzle with that photograph and attach it piece by piece to the guitar. I also wanted to make a guitar without frets. At least without most frets — I decided to keep the first five frets in, to make playing the standard guitar chords possible for someone who never played fretless before (i.e. myself).

I figured that the best approach for someone with no real experience in guitar building would be to find a suitable instrument to use as a baseline and modify it according to the ideas that I had. I started a blog at http://cmsguitar.blogspot.com and described the whole process there: design decisions, tests and my attempts to learn the different skills and tricks needed along the way — like removing a fretboard from a guitar using a clothes iron and a steak knife.

I am now trying to master playing the fretless part of the guitar, with the aim of writing and releasing some original music performed on this instrument. And I will of course be using it during live shows with my band. I'm keeping the blog up to date with what's happening.